Mainers usually are justifiably happy with the state’s maritime heritage — however that heritage is extra sophisticated and shadowy than many individuals notice. Sea captains and shipowners from the Pine Tree State have been energetic members within the slave financial system.  

That’s one of many takeaways from “Cotton City: Maine’s Financial Connections to Slavery,” an exhibit on the Maine Maritime Museum in Bathtub that makes use of major sources and objects from the museum’s assortment to shine a lightweight on the previous.

“Positively it’s a fairly shocking a part of historical past,” Luke Gates-Milardo, the schooling and group engagement specialist on the Maine Maritime Museum in Bathtub, mentioned Thursday. “It’ll be outdoors some individuals’s consolation zones.”

Gates-Milardo will probably be giving a web based presentation in regards to the exhibit subsequent week by the Camden Public Library.  

“Cotton City” got here into being after a researcher working within the Raymond H. Fogler Library’s Particular Collections stumbled upon a doc from October 1850 that generated a variety of questions. It was a invoice of lading for the cargo of 93 enslaved individuals from Baltimore to New Orleans on the Bathtub-built ship John C. Calhoun.

The doc consists of the names of the enslaved individuals, their ages and their value.

The Calhoun was a Maine ship by and thru. It was a part of the Clark & Sewall Co.’s service provider fleet, owned by William D. Sewall and Freeman Clark of Bathtub, and its captain was John C. Lowell, additionally of Bathtub.

“Everybody in Bathtub is aware of the Sewalls … they’ve achieved a variety of actually superb issues for the group, traditionally,” Gates-Milardo mentioned. “That is simply acknowledging the place that wealth got here from, a few of it. These similar captains who have been transporting cotton have been additionally transporting enslaved individuals extra usually than was thought.”

The invoice of lading is a part of the museum’s exhibit. So, too, are letters that Lowell wrote to Clark and Sewall, during which the captain expressed concern about making a worthwhile voyage. On Oct. 11, 1850, he wrote from Baltimore to allow them to know that he had “engaged this morning 80 negroes at $12 p[er] head & assume the prospect good for 40 or 50 extra on the similar fee.”

However that wasn’t one thing Lowell needed to promote round Bathtub.  

“Please say nothing about my taking negroes,” he wrote.

On the time, slavery was authorized within the southern United States, although had been outlawed in Maine for 30 years.

At this time, persons are extra prone to find out about Maine’s abolitionist historical past, together with the truth that Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Brunswick when she wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which galvanized many to protest slavery after its 1852 publication. Earlier than the Civil Struggle, anti-slavery societies flourished in lots of components of the state, and Maine was a cease on the Underground Railroad for African-People who got here north searching for freedom.

Maine additionally despatched extra males to battle within the Civil Struggle than another state, on a per capita foundation.

However historical past will be murky.

“It’s by no means cut-and-dry, by no means easy,” Gates-Milardo mentioned. “The coastal communities have been fairly divided. There have been lots of people who have been actually towards the abolitionist motion. They tended to be actually influential shipyard house owners and captains whose revenue was actually depending on slavery.”

Again then, as now, communities might be politically divided and Lowell’s letters present he was conscious of the tensions.

“You may inform he’s fairly anxious in regards to the enterprise ordeals and the social implications of what he was doing,” Gates-Milardo mentioned.

“Cotton City,” which opened in December and was initially slated to run by Could 8, will probably be tailored to the museum’s everlasting assortment. It was created collaboratively with Tess Chakkalakal, the chair of the Bowdoin School Africana Research Division, and her Africana Research college students.

“It was a extremely cool alternative to be taught from the scholars and contextualize the extra native historical past,” Gates-Milardo mentioned.  

The Bowdoin college students helped select objects from the museum’s assortment to incorporate within the exhibit, Gates-Milardo mentioned. Amongst these are 18th century letters detailing slavery in Maine and a sugar bowl and rum jug that assist illustrate the so-called “triangular commerce” routes of the 18th and early nineteenth centuries.

Speedy service provider ships in-built Maine and owned by Mainers have been a part of that route, which introduced uncooked supplies resembling sugar, tobacco and cotton from the Americas to Europe, textiles, rum and manufactured items from Europe to Africa and enslaved peoples from Africa to the Americas.

The goal of each the exhibit and Gates-Milardo’s upcoming lecture is to indicate a extra full view of the previous — not only a sanitized one.

“It’s invaluable to simply accept and acknowledge an entire historical past,” he mentioned. “And it’s dangerous to do the other.”

To register and get a Zoom hyperlink for the Camden Public Library’s on-line presentation at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 28, go to the occasions calendar on the library’s web site or use this registration hyperlink.

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